The definition of Propaganda (according to Wikipedia) is:
"communication aimed at influencing the attitude of a community toward some cause or position. As opposed to impartially providing information, propaganda in its most basic sense, presents information primarily to influence an audience. Propaganda often presents facts selectively (thus lying by omission) to encourage a particular synthesis, or uses loaded messages to produce an emotional rather than rational response to the information presented. The desired result is a change of the attitude toward the subject in the target audience to further a political agenda."
"...a specific type of message presentation, aimed at serving an agenda. Even if the message conveys true information, it may be partisan and fail to paint a complete picture. The book Propaganda And Persuasion defines propaganda as "the deliberate, systematic attempt to shape perceptions, manipulate cognitions, and direct behavior to achieve a response that furthers the desired intent of the propagandist.""
"Propaganda in favor of action that is consonant with enlightened self-interest appeals to reason by means of logical arguments based upon the best available evidence fully and honestly set forth. Propaganda in favor of action dictated by the impulses that are below self-interest offers false, garbled or incomplete evidence, avoids logical argument and seeks to influence its victims by the mere repetition of catchwords, by the furious denunciation of foreign or domestic scapegoats, and by cunningly associating the lowest passions with the highest ideals, so that atrocities come to be perpetrated in the name of God and the most cynical kind of Realpolitik is treated as a matter of religious principle and patriotic duty."
TV News
News, whether TV, radio, newspaper or internet, is a potent source of propaganda. A huge difference between TV news and newspaper/internet is the cost of production. For example, a one hour episode of "60 Minutes" costs about $600,000 to produce. The cost of producing a newspaper and/or internet news site pales in comparison. Numerous smaller organizations and companies, with differing viewpoints and standards can afford to produce print-based news. But only huge corporations can afford the production costs and costs related to buying stations and/or channels. Fox News, for example, lost millions of dollars before finally turning a profit.
For many commentators, the solution is for TV news to be reformed. After all, TV news is the main source of news for most Americans, if TV news could be improved, that would solve the problem of a misinformed electorate.
Al Gore, in his book The Assault on Reason, agrees with this reasoning, but he also goes further. He argues that it isn't just the content of TV news that is the problem, but that it is TV itself (the medium) which is a problem, because of it's one-way passive nature.
"...the Internet is not just another platform for disseminating the truth. It's a platform for pursuing the truth, and the decentralized creation and distribution of ideas, in the same way that markets are a decentralized mechanism for the creation and distribution of goods and services. It's a platform, in other words, for reason.
Mr. Gore also makes the argument that reading stimulates the intellect, while television (the medium) stimulates the emotions...with disastrous consequences for our Democracy.
"The dominant use of television as a news source, however, has raised concern among communication researchers because the common presumption is that television is too fast-paced to be an effective information medium (e.g., Singer, 1980). Compared with television, print is assumed to be considerably more effective because print offers more opportunities to exercise control over the processing of information than television does. Unlike viewers, readers can digest the news at their own pace, reread passages, and check details--all of which can facilitate memory for news information (e.g., Gunter, 1987)."
"The relative ineffectiveness of television news compared with print news has been supported by a number of media comparison experiments that compared memory for television news stories with memory for printed versions of the television narratives. In most of these studies, participants indeed remembered more from the printed news than from the television stories (e.g., DeFleur, Davenport, Cronin, & DeFleur, 1992; Facorro & DeFleur, 1993; Furnham & Gunter, 1985, 1987; Gunter & Furnham, 1986; Gunter, Furnham, & Gietson, 1984; Gunter, Furnham, & Leese, 1986; Wicks & Drew, 1991; Wilson, 1974)."
See also: Media and Learning by Steven D. Tripp University of Aizu "Although Furnham and Gunter have found a variety of results under differing conditions, they have consistently found that subjects remember material presented in a print medium better than identical material presented in an audio medium or a combined audiovisual medium. Gunter (1987) concluded that this was due to the INHERENT CAPACITIES of these different media to convey knowledge. These differences were found for samples drawn from populations of schoolchildren, university students, military personnel, and non-students. Across these categories the most consistent result was that subjects REMEMBER BETTER from print materials than audio or audiovisual materials."
"Hospital staff make better decisions using textual information rather than medical charts" - BPS Research Digest Blog (2010)
Newscasters will keep promising a particularly interesting story "coming up next!". Meanwhile the viewer has to sit there and watch a bunch of commercials, and/or uninteresting and/or irrelevant stories until the story they are interested in finally arrives.
With the print news, on the other hand, the reader can pick and choose what to read without following the the dictates of the newscaster. The reader can actively seek out which areas of the news to focus on and/or browse the contents. Readers can also re-read and/or bookmark the stories that they find particularly compelling.
"In 1976 Rupert Murdoch bought the New York Post and it has lost money every year since, the total loss estimated to be more than half a billion dollars. In 1983, the Rev. Sun Myung Moon created the Washington Times, which has also lost money every year. Widely published reports place Moon's losses at over $1 billion on the Times and other political media including a purchase the venerable wire service UPI. These money losing properties have put dozens of conservatively slanted stories onto the national radar screen, altered the framing of every important political issues, and nurtured virtually every right wing pundit who now thrive as TV talking heads. " - Down With Tyranny (Jan 2010)
News Agenda
"In the 1970's, Maxwell McCombs and Donald Shaw set out to understand how news organizations affect what people view as their most pressing civic issues. In their study they examined local (Chapel Hill, N.C.) newspapers and news broadcasts and then asked residents to list what issues they were most concerned about. What they found was telling. A majority of the respondents cited concerns that matched the front-page and lead stories in their local newspaper and TV news broadcasts. They also found that the news stories that newspapers and broadcasts devoted less time and space to ended up being on the bottom of the respondents' lists. Over the years, repeated studies by other researchers have yielded similar results." - Psychology Today Blog (Oct 2009)
"Study Claims Even the Most Sophisticated News Readers Can Be Manipulated" - Alternet (Nov 2009)
"Wells Fargo Senior Analyst, Marci Ryvicker predicts that $3.3 billion will be spent in political and issue advertising in 2010 – with 67% of every dollar spent going to television." - TV Is Not Dead (Nov 2009)
Other Media
"To get their message out, the conservatives have a powerful media empire, which churns out and amplifies the message of the day - or the week - through a wide network of outlets and individuals, including Fox News, talk radio, Rush Limbaugh, Oliver North, Ann Coulter, as well as religious broadcasters like Pat Robertson and his 700 Club. On the web, it starts with TownHall.com" - Alternet (Feb 2005)
"I've been writing a lot about the role Fox News and the right wing noise machine played in getting Scott Brown elected in Massachusetts. Margery Eagan, a Boston Herald reporter (who supported Coakley) told Howard Kurtz that right-wing talk radio and sports talk radio demonized Martha Coakley endlessly. This was a big part of her fall after she held a 31-point lead in MA." - Crooks & Liars (Jan 2010)
"Intrigued by these fabrications, Loftus and two colleagues conducted an experiment to test whether doctored photos could modify political memories. They selected two famous protests: Tiananmen Square and a peace rally in Rome. To a photo of the Rome rally, they added menacing protesters and police in riot gear. To an iconic image from the Beijing uprising—a lone man blocking a column of tanks—they added throngs of people lining the route. The revisions worked. Compared with subjects who saw the real photo of Tiananmen, those who saw the doctored photo were twice as likely to estimate that more than 500,000 people had participated. And compared with subjects who saw the real photo from Rome, those who saw the doctored photo were four times as likely to say that people had died in the protest. Loftus expressed alarm at the spread of photo manipulation, calling it "a form of human engineering that could be applied to us against our knowledge and against our wishes." "We have to figure how we can regulate this," she warned." - Slate (May 2010)
Since huge corporations almost always own divisions who sell to the pentagon, it is not surprising that their TV News shows wholeheatedly support war:
- Buying the War
"It’s not every day that a broadcast journalist at a major network acknowledges for a national audience that she was “under enormous pressure from corporate executives,” who later edited her pieces and pushed her in specific pro-war directions." - Alternet (May 2008)
- Disappearing Antiwar Protests
"Hundreds of thousands of Americans around the country protested the Iraq War on the weekend of September 24-25, with the largest demonstration bringing between 100,000 and 300,000 to Washington, D.C. on Saturday. But if you relied on television for your news, you'd hardly know the protests happened at all." - FAIR (Sept 2005)
- Military Analyst Story 1
"This morning's "blockbuster" New York Times article by David Barstow, documenting the Pentagon and U.S. media's joint use of pre-programmed "military analysts" who posed as objective experts while touting the Government line and having extensive business interests in promoting those views, is very well-documented and well-reported. And credit to the NYT for having sued to compel disclosure of the documents on which the article is based. There are significant elements of the story that exemplify excellent investigative journalism. - Salon (April 2008)
- Military Analyst Story 2
"It has now been more than ten days since the New York Times exposed the Pentagon's domestic propaganda program involving retired generals and, still, not a single major news network has even mentioned the story to their viewers, let alone responded to the numerous questions surrounding their own behavior." - Salon (April 2008)
- Military Analyst Story 3
"Hidden behind that appearance of objectivity, though, is a Pentagon information apparatus that has used those analysts in a campaign to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance, an examination by The New York Times has found." - The New York Times (April 2008)
- Iraq War 1
"One of the most amazing aspects of this week has been watching network media stars feign shock over the fact that anyone could suggest that they were "deferential, complicit enablers" of the Bush march to war. It's as though they never heard anyone ever suggest such a thing until George Bush's own Press Secretary mocked them for being meek, uncritical disseminators of government propaganda, and now -- they seem to want to convey -- they're just so confused and astonished that anyone could possibly think that about them." - Salon (May 2008)
- Iraq War 2
"The arc of our country and its media: from David Halberstam's confrontation with a U.S. General in Vietnam over his demands to investigate (rather than mindlessly accept) the Pentagon's war claims to Charlie Gibson and Brian Williams sitting around giggling on TV with Matt Lauer and muttering about what a great job they did in covering the administration's march to invade Iraq..." - Salon (May 2008)
- Iraq War 3
"If you step back and survey the totality of media's performance this summer on the Iraq debate, it becomes a good deal clearer just how awful it's all been -- and just how complicit these failings were in helping to shift the debate" - Talking Points Memo (Sept 2007)
TV News - Examples
- Santa Claus
"The mainstream media is made up of gigantic corporations. Like all corporations, they manufacture a product, which is their audience. They sell this product to their customers, which are other huge corporations.
Informing people about the world is not just irrelevant to the purpose of making money, but in many ways actually HURTS a corporation's profitability. No business goes out of its way to piss off its owners and customers. Now, obviously it's true you hear constantly about the media's Unending Fight For Truth. But you also hear constantly that a fat man wearing a red suit breaks into America's homes at the end of each year to distribute new X-boxes. Neither of these things is real. " - A Tiny Revolution (Oct 2005)
"Comcast censors criticisms of itself and Rep. Carney" - Salon (June 2008)
- Apologies
"Notice a pattern? Aside from Andrea Mitchell's crack about Virginia, which was offensive in a nonpartisan way, every one of the apologies has been about an offensive remark aimed at a Democrat. Funny, that." - The Washington Monthly (June 2008)
- Sophomoric Taunting
"GOP gets a thumpin', and media revive their substance-free, sophomoric taunting ... of Democrats" - Media Matters (Nov 2006)
- Megaphone
"It may seem absurd, but Democrats can control the White House, House, and Senate, but it's Republicans who have the edge on the megaphone gap." - The Washington Monthly (Jan 2010)
- ABC and Anthrax
"Vital unresolved anthrax questions and ABC News" - Salon (Aug 2008)
- CBS Video Altered
"However, CBS probably violated its own rules (Standards and Practice) by altering the video of Katie Couric's interview with McCain that left out his major blunder on this issue and then broadcast it on our airwaves." - Crooks & Liars (July 2008)
- Broken Media 1
"It's so illustrative of the problems with our corporate media that the guy who wins a Pulitzer prize for investigative reporting is ignored - because he was investigating the corporate media for stacking the deck with paid sources to support the Iraq war" - Crooks & Liars (April 2009)
- Broken Media 2
"This week, Jay Rosen -- the NYU Journalism Professor and author of the PressThink blog -- wrote one of the best and most insightful pieces yet on how the American media artificially limits the range of political debate." - Salon (Jan 2009)
And according to 
